Summer of Nixon

Richard Nixon didn’t sleep well as president. He kept a bedroom to himself, and placed dictation machines on a bedside table to capture his insomniac inspirations. He was a tense man even before entering the White House, and what with opening China, ending the war in Vietnam, taking the United States off the gold standard, integrating Southern schools, founding the Environmental Protection Agency and cutting nuclear arms deals with the Soviet Union, he had more than a little on his mind.

And then there was Watergate. On June 17, 1972, a troop of clowns wearing business suits and rubber gloves, dispatched by Nixon’s senior aides, were caught pilfering and bugging the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The president joined in a cover-up operation to thwart prosecution of those who ordered the break-in and save his re-election campaign from damaging, perhaps fatal, disclosures.

At first the scandal seemed contained, yet still it disrupted Nixon’s slumbers.

“I had this strangest dream last night,” he told his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, in a July 20, 1972, conversation captured on the White House tape-recording system and included in a new book, The Nixon Defense, by John W. Dean, the president’s former counsel. “I have a feeling Watergate’s going to be a nasty issue … but I can’t believe … maybe I’m whistling in the dark … but I can’t believe that they can tie it to me.”

Whistling in the dark, he was. On Aug. 9, America will mark the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation from office, one step ahead of near-certain impeachment. This latest Watergate summer brings the publication of Dean’s book and four other additions to the Nixon canon, all of them—each in its way—valuable in the quest to understand this elusive, most Shakespearean of presidents. Much of the analysis is exculpatory, but a few new revelations of misdeeds are startling. At the heart of these volumes is Nixon in shame and glory: a man of humble roots, stunning ambition, legendary resiliency, tragic flaws, condemnable sins—and, yes, rare dreams.

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The arcs of conspiracy theories bend in predictable directions. The triggering event—a great crime or disaster—occurs. Investigations begin. Bureaucracies scurry to conceal their failures. Exposure of their scheming feeds doubts, fanned by opportunists and those that savor intrigue.

And then time passes. Old men yield their secrets. Documents are declassified. Scholars weigh in. The record is adjusted.

Lost in Transcription

Two very different readings of the Nixon tapes.

In his new book, The Nixon Defense, John Dean cites several notable exchanges that were not transcribed by Stanley Kutler in his 1997 book, Abuse of Power, a seminal text of Watergate transcripts. But, in several cases where they do overlap, Dean hears and reports things differently than Kutler does.

On Nov. 24, 1972, for example, Kutler has President Nixon asking his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to get Dean to write a report—“some sort of piece”—absolving the White House of wrongdoing.

Dean’s version is more evocative, showing a more human president, wanting to rid his second term of the shadow cast by Watergate. “Let’s find some sort of peace,” Nixon says.

There is another difference in Dean’s and Kutler’s reporting of a June 21, 1972, conversation between Nixon and Haldeman.

In Dean’s version of the exchange, he hears Nixon instructing Haldeman to “go ahead” with the Watergate cover up.

Nixon: “If it involved [Attorney General John] Mitchell, then I would think that you couldn’t do it, just because it would destroy him.”

Haldeman: “I put it almost directly to Mitchell this morning, and he didn’t answer so I don't know whether it does or not.”

Nixon: “Probably did ... but don’t tell me about it. But you go ahead and do what you want.”

This time Kutler has the more forgiving version. He hears Nixon speculating about what Mitchell might have told the burglars. In Kutler’s transcript, the words “go ahead” are not Nixon issuing an order, just a guess at what Mitchell could have said:

Nixon: “If it involved Mitchell, then I would think that you couldn’t do it, just because it would destroy him.”

Haldeman: “Yes. I put it almost directly to Mitchell this morning and he didn’t answer, so I don’t know whether it does or not.”

Nixon: “Hell, he may have said, don’t tell me about it, but you go ahead and do what you want.”

Because the quality of the tapes varies widely, such differences are not unusual. Readers—and listeners, since all the declassified recordings are now available online at Professor Luke Nichter’s website, http://nixontapes.org — should take their time, and rewind a few times, before making definitive conclusions.

Intriguing questions linger, as they must in all endeavors involving human beings, where memory is a renegade and self-interest is the default setting. Who paid John Wilkes Booth? What was Lee Oswald doing in Mexico City? But not all answers are essential. We can get to the bedrock, and live with some niggling ambiguity.

So it is with the complex of scandals that have come to be known as Watergate. After 40 years, and much silly speculation about Deep Throat, call girls, the Mob and the CIA, we can say with some confidence that we know what happened to Nixon’s presidency, and why.

Much of that story is told in The Nixon Defense. Taking advantage of the full array of White House tapes (the “final” release took place last August, but archivists will now review the recordings again, to declassify and open segments from 800 redacted hours), Dean sets out to answer the question raised by the late Howard Baker, the Tennessee senator who served as vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

With the aid of a flight of graduate students, Dean has identified a thousand discussions of Watergate on the tapes. He augments the story with his own recollections, selections from Haldeman’s notes and diary and Nixon’s memoirs. Ancient history? Maybe. But there’s a reason why we’ve applied the suffix -gate to lesser scandals for four decades, and why partisan hacks (displaying their usual, woeful ignorance of history) dub almost every gaffe by the opposition “worse than Watergate.”

Watergate is sui generis, dwarfing any other political scandal that Americans have experienced. Ponder the butcher’s bill for the Watergate era: The president of the United States resigned, and accepted a pardon for his crimes. The vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew, resigned, and pled no contest to income tax evasion for accepting bribes.Two attorneys general of the United States—John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst—were found guilty. The White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, the president’s counsel, John Dean, and top domestic counselor, John Ehrlichman—and several other White House aides (Special Counsel Chuck Colson, etc.)—were found guilty. The president’s personal lawyer and fundraiser, Herb Kalmbach, was found guilty. The director of the CIA was found guilty. The director of the FBI was caught destroying evidence, and resigned. The top officials at the president’s re-election campaign (Mitchell, Jeb Magruder, Maurice Stans and Fred LaRue) were found guilty. Another attorney general and his chief deputy resigned in protest rather than fire a special prosecutor. And more than a dozen of the country’s mightiest corporations and their executives—including American Airlines, Goodyear Tire, Gulf Oil, Northrup and Phillips Petroleum—were found guilty of seeking to buy favor via campaign contributions. Send in the clowns (Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt and the gang) and, all told, some 60 individuals and more than a dozen corporations were found guilty of one Watergate-related crime or another, and 25 men went to prison.

John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and attorney Clarence Darrow, as well as a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon.